Simon Armitage
Born on 26 May 1963 in Huddersfield, Simon Armitage is a citizen of the United Kingdom who works in English across an unusually wide range of forms. His practice takes in poetry, fiction, drama, music, art history, and literary scholarship — a combination that places him at once inside and beyond the conventional boundaries of any single discipline.
Armitage was educated at the University of Portsmouth and later at the Victoria University of Manchester. He works as a poet, novelist, playwright, musician, art historian, and literary scholar, and holds a professorship of poetry at the University of Leeds.
The honours attached to his name are extensive. He received the Eric Gregory Award and the Cholmondeley Award, both associated with the recognition of poets, as well as the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. He holds a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Literature, an honorary doctorate, and the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire. On 10 May 2019 he was appointed Poet Laureate.
That appointment on 10 May 2019 stands as a precise marker in the public record of his career. Alongside the laureate role, he continues as professor of poetry at the University of Leeds, a position that reflects the range of his engagement with the art form as practitioner, scholar, and teacher.
Quotes by Simon Armitage
I once stood in the middle of New York city watching my name go round the electronic zipper sign in Times Square and I felt pretty thrilled, but not quite as thrilled as I felt when I saw my name in the 'Examiner' for the first time.
In all the poems I’ve written I’ve not really engaged in politics, and when I’ve found myself moving in that direction I’ve always stopped myself.
A woman plays the Northumberland pipes; from where I’m sitting, on a wall at the back, it looks like she’s giving physiotherapy to a small marsupial wearing callipers and smoking a bong, but the sound is haunting and hypnotic, mournful and melodic at the same time, every note somehow harmonising with the low, droning purr.
I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task – based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.
I wondered if people might not have had enough of Simon Armitage and wondered whether I hadn’t had enough of Simon Armitage.
Killing time in the precinct, I find a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop. The price is 10p. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words, “To mum and dad”.
You’re beautiful because when you were born, undiscovered planets lined up to peep over the rim of your cradle and lay gifts of gravity and light at your miniature feet.
As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.